Links with Teleconferencing Services

While Microsoft continues to enhance the capabilities of its own Live Meeting service, it is not yet fully able to support voice conferencing natively. Today, third parties play an important role in providing teleconferencing services, and plug a gap in Microsoft’s telephony story.

Although Office Communicator 2005 allows users to add parties on other private branch exchange (PBX) extensions to a voice conversation, and on many PBXs users can even add parties from outside lines, this approach is impractical for larger teleconferences, and companies typically use an external conferencing provider, such as a telephone company. (These services route all parties to the provider’s audio bridge hardware, and even if several of the parties are behind the same PBX, each party ties up a separate external line connecting into the bridge.)

Communicator allows users to set up and manage teleconferences through conferencing providers that support Live Communications Server (LCS). Not all conference participants need to be from organizations with LCS and Communicator. However, in such organizations, Communicator users can schedule a conference, get a reminder, and navigate through a “Join Conference” menu to call the provider’s audio bridge and become part of a voice conference. The leader can completely control the session from the Communicator UI and perform such actions as muting and un-muting participants, placing calls to participants, and ending the conference. Participants can use Communicator to join the conference, view the call roster and leader information, and leave the conference.